Response to Berkson, Davis, & Strickler, ‘What does incipient /ay/-raising look like?’

Berkson, Davis, and Strickler (2017) provide an invaluable report on incipient /ay/-raising in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Their data suggest that /ay/-raising conditioned strictly by phonetic voicelessness is a possible early stage in the development of /ay/-raising. This raises a particularly vexing question of why /ay/-raising has gone on to be conditioned by phonological voicing in all North American varieties for which its interaction with /t, d/ flapping has been examined. It suggests that the process of phonologization reorganizes the distribution of phonetic variants, rather than simply discretizing phonetic precursors.